Book Deal Page 8

  “I’m sorry,” he said to Fonseca. He was already jerking open the door of the Hog. “I’ve got to get to a phone.”

  Fonseca looked at him oddly. “Here,” the architect said without hesitation, reaching into his jacket pocket. “Use mine.”

  Deal hesitated, halfway into the Hog. He stared at the cell phone Fonseca extended to him. A tiny clamshell of plastic, about the size of a ladies’ compact, if a bit fatter. There was an expression of puzzlement on Fonseca’s face, as if he were waiting for Deal to explain where his own cellular had been left. Deal glanced around, calculating how far he’d have to drive through this residential area before he’d find a pay phone.

  “Thanks,” he said finally, and took the tiny phone.

  Fonseca waved it away and strolled off toward the portico-to-be, giving Deal his privacy.

  Deal unfolded the phone, took a moment to find the right switches, finally punched in the number he read from the beeper. There were two rings before the connection made and a voice said something in what might have been Spanish.

  Deal covered his ear against the rush of the breeze. “I didn’t understand you.”

  More of what sounded like Spanish, ending with what sounded like, “…a cleaner.”

  “Look,” he said impatiently, “this is John Deal. Somebody beeped me…”

  “Oh,” he heard, the person breaking in. “Momentito!”

  He heard clattering at the other end, as if a wall phone had been left to dangle, the sounds of a cash register ringing, then, finally, “Deal?” It was Janice’s voice, pained, breathless. The sound of trouble on the way.

  “It’s me,” he said. “What is it, Janice?”

  “The store,” she said. “The bookstore…” Her voice trailed off as she struggled to get her breathing under control.

  “You’re at the bookstore?” He felt his own pulse thudding in response suddenly. He glanced at Fonseca, who was on the other side of the lot, gingerly digging the toe of his shoe at something in the loose earth near one of the foundation markers. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m at the dry cleaner’s, down the street,” she said, her voice straining. “The phone in the store doesn’t work. Deal. They must have cut the lines…Wait, just a minute…” He heard a siren in the distance, excited voices in rapid-fire Spanish. He glanced northward, out over the water where a pair of frigate birds hung motionless against the incoming breeze, pointed toward the shimmering skyline of the city. I can see very nearly to where she is, he thought…and it only made him feel more helpless.

  Then she was on the line again. “I called an ambulance, Deal. And the police…” she broke off, her voice nearly lost in her sobbing. “Oh Deal…I have to go…”

  “Janice,” he shouted, his head light, his ears ringing with dread. More sirens in the background, the thudding of the phone as it bounced along the wall.

  “I’m on my way, Janice,” Deal cried, already sliding behind the wheel. He fired up the Hog, dropped it into gear, and mashed the accelerator, fishtailing across the building lot in a billowing cloud of dust. He leaned out the window to toss Fonseca his phone, and caught a glimpse of the architect’s astonished expression as the thing bounced off his chest and out of his clumsy grasp.

  The Hog took out a line of blue-ribboned marking stakes along one side of the property, and then Deal had to grab the wheel with both hands as the big car launched itself off the back side of the building pad, hurtled through space for a second or two, then slammed down hard, chewing fill dirt and powdered coral into a plume that raced with him all the way out to the street.

  ***

  “I know who did this, Deal,” she said, her voice flat, hollow. He’d had to steady her, hold her upright while they were loading Arch’s body into the coroner’s wagon. Now that the van had pulled away, now that it was disappearing down the street, she had steadied. She’d stepped away from his grasp, stood with her arms wrapped about herself, staring after the departing vehicle with a frightening intensity.

  Deal glanced through the propped-open door inside the ruined store, where a team of investigators combed through the wreckage. Vernon Driscoll was in there somewhere as well. Deal had called him from the same dry-cleaning shop Janice had used earlier, and the excop had turned up at the store inside ten minutes. Driscoll was a good four years off the force, but still had his connections. There’d been a moment of hushed conversation between Driscoll and the lead detective on the scene—burly, hangdog Driscoll in his rumpled coat and baggy slacks, and a wiry counterpart twenty years his junior wearing a close-cut Italian suit—and then Driscoll had ducked inside, under the crime scene tape that fluttered in the breeze at the door.

  “Are you okay?” Deal said, turning back to Janice. He had begun to feel lightheaded himself. “Do you want to sit down somewhere?”

  She turned, studied him for a moment. “He wanted to build a café, did you know that, Deal?” She waved her hand aimlessly. “He’d have made it a sidewalk café, if they would have let him, the zoning and all.”

  Deal nodded, reached a comforting hand her way. “I know, Janice.”

  “This town,” she said, her mind flipping somewhere else abruptly, the way your TV cable company might toss you right out of the world you thought you were in. “You own a pickup truck, you can’t even park in your own driveway.” She turned back to him, her eyes blazing. “Everything’s about appearances. How everything looks.”

  “Janice,” he said warily, stepping toward her. His stomach was hardening into a knot. He’d lost her down such a path before, had watched the Janice he knew and loved dissolve before his very eyes, vanish from his life as surely as if she’d been whisked away inside some alien space beam.

  She stepped back, just out of his reach. “Arch didn’t care all that much about cafés, though.” She glanced at him as though she were explaining something to a stranger. “He just felt he had to, you know. Because all the big stores have them now. Cafés and croissants and stages where a band can play…” She broke off, shaking her head. When she glanced at him again, her eyes were glistening. “Damn it, Deal. All he ever wanted to do was sell books. To people who loved to read. And they killed him, for that?”

  One of the detectives inside glanced out the open doorway, then went back to his work, carefully stacking book after book, shaking each one as if some message might come tumbling out from between the pages. Deal stepped forward, caught her shoulders. “Janice, is this something you’ve talked about with the police?”

  She glanced inside, shook her head. “No,” she said, and suddenly her voice was calm again. She glanced at him, somber, but composed. A different person, somehow, as though the things she’d just said were thoughts that had never been uttered. “They think it was a robbery.”

  Another detective inside had cleared a pathway to a tumbled set of shelves blocking the passage to the magazine room, was dusting the edge of the wood for fingerprints. Just a bunch of guys doing their work, Deal thought, images of hurricane cleanup flitting across his mind. Disaster strikes, and you carry on. “Being not the ones dead…” The words echoed in his mind. Some fragment from a poem Arch had quoted to him once, that much had never left him.

  “And you think it wasn’t robbery?” he tried again, gently.

  She glanced up at him as if he’d made an accusation. For a moment she seemed ready to snap at him. And then, suddenly, her expression shattered and she collapsed against his chest. “Oh, Deal,” she sobbed. “It was awful. It was terrible.”

  “I know,” he said, holding her tightly, patting her back. “I know.”

  The words came hesitantly at first, then began to pour. “I came in the back door,” she paused, gulping a breath. “…and when I found it unlocked I started to worry. And then when I walked in and saw the mess…I mean, if the door had been forced open I’d have thought, okay, someone broke in, in the night…” She stopped to look up at him. “But I knew Arch would never forget to lock that door,
and I started walking through the rooms, calling his name, because his car was outside, and I had to crawl over those shelves to get into the front, and by that time I knew something terrible had happened…”

  “Janice,” Deal began, trying to soothe her, but she pulled away from him again, wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand. “I have to tell you this, Deal. All right? I have to tell you.”

  He put his hands up, nodding in reassurance, and she went on.

  “I saw the cash register open, and the cash box,” she said, “and the checks and credit card receipts scattered all over and I had to force myself to look behind the counter and he wasn’t there and I was saying ‘Thank God, thank God,’ but then I saw the front door was still locked and bolted, so I went back into the children’s section…”

  She faltered again and Deal reached out for her, but she held up her hand, gathering herself. When she turned to him again, her eyes were blazing. “They’d destroyed it, Deal. The children’s room. Ripped it apart. Not just the books. The displays, the artwork, the little tables and chairs. You wouldn’t believe what it looks like in there,”

  He shook his head helplessly. “Maybe it was kids…”

  “Kids?” she said incredulously. “Kids aren’t capable of doing what happened in there.” She paused. “Animals, maybe. Not kids.”

  “Janice, we don’t know what might have happened yet…”

  “I know what I saw, Deal. I know what I found upstairs. Do you know what that felt like? Walking up those stairs, knowing what I was going to find? If you’d seen what I’d seen. Oh, dear God,” she said, crumbling again. “Oh, Arch. Oh, poor, dear Arch…”

  He caught her in his arms, pulled her close, imagining despite himself what it must have been like, finding Arch there in the airless room. He’d had a glimpse as they’d brought the body out…it’d been like taking a blow, the one you never saw coming. Everything normal enough, but then suddenly your head is snapping back and there doesn’t seem to be any more oxygen in the air around you and you’re gulping and staggering, your legs full of sand…

  Another wave of lightheadedness swept over him and he had the sudden feeling he was clutching Janice against an awful gale, that the sidewalk beneath their feet was not a sidewalk at all, but the deck of some pitiful boat that could pitch them over at any instant. His hand went to the back of her neck, pressed her face close to his chest. He could smell her shampoo, the same woodsy scent she’d always used, could feel the dampness of her cheek on his shirt, the heat of her against him…he felt something giving way inside him, an immense longing swelling up, threatening to crush the wall he’d so painstakingly constructed over these past months—if you don’t let it, it can’t hurt you, be safe, be safe, be safe—these pitiful voices of reason flying away in the face of the welling emotion that threatened to crash down upon him like one of those huge breakers the surfers dare to fall…

  “Janice,” he murmured, might have been about to add, I love you, nothing can change that, nothing can be too terrible if that holds…

  And that was when he heard the voice at his shoulder.

  “Mr. Deal?”

  Deal glanced up to see an older man in a white suit and Panama hat standing beside them, an expression of concern on his face. A jewelry salesman, Deal found himself thinking. An undertaker’s front man.

  “I’m Richard Levitt,” the man said quietly as Deal continued to stare. He seemed apologetic for interrupting, yet made no move to step away.

  Deal shook his head, uncomprehending. He felt Janice pulling from his grasp.

  “Richard,” she said, her voice weak, still choked with emotion. Her gaze went to him, then back to Deal.

  Deal glanced across the street then, saw the car drawn up to the curb, in front of a crowd of curious bystanders that a uniformed cop was keeping at bay. The front of the car was angled toward him this time, so that no plate was visible, but it was the same Japanese luxury car he’d seen yesterday, gliding up in front of Arch’s to take his wife away. There was a moment of silence, the three of them exchanging glances, a piece of very bad theater, or so it seemed to Deal.

  “You’re the gallery owner,” Deal said finally. “From Sarasota.”

  Levitt nodded, cut his glance at Janice. “I’m terribly sorry,” he said softly. Then he added, “Are you all right?”

  Janice nodded.

  Levitt seemed uncertain, compelled to move toward her, yet wary of Deal’s presence at his side.

  He turned to Deal. “I’m really not certain…can you tell me what’s happened?”

  Deal shook his head. “Arch Dolan was killed,” he said, gesturing at the mess inside. “It might have been a robbery.”

  “My God,” Levitt said. His hand went automatically to his head. He pulled his hat off, gazed in through the open door in dismay.

  Levitt’s hair was snowy white, but thinning. Deal could see liver spots dotting his scalp, noticed them on the back of the man’s hands as well. Well kept, but sixty-five if he was a day. Deal shook his head, confused at the welter of thoughts that coursed through his mind. Did he need to be jealous of this man? He glanced at Janice, who had moved away a bit, held a hand against the store’s facade to steady herself.

  “Janice discovered it,” Deal continued. “She didn’t tell you?”

  Levitt shook his head, still reeling himself, apparently. “No…I got a call that there was trouble…” He broke off, turned back to Janice.

  “I’m not feeling very well,” she said, her face pasty.

  It was enough for Levitt. “Come sit in the car,” he said. He glanced at Deal, but he was already moving toward her.

  Deal fought an irrational urge to step in his way. But what was he going to do, shove the old man away? Deck him? Shout, foot atop his silk-shirted chest, “Hell, no, she can’t sit in your Japanese car!” The whirl of emotions within him seemed beyond what any reasonable person should be asked to contend with. Arch murdered, Janice here beside him, in his arms one moment, being whisked off by a man he’d fantasized beating to a pulp more than once…

  “Yo, Deal.” He heard the gruff voice behind him then, and turned to see Driscoll in the doorway of the store, beckoning.

  Driscoll seemed surprised at Deal’s hesitation. “Come on, it’s okay,” he said, impatient.

  Janice was already moving unsteadily across the street, one of Levitt’s hands on her arm, the other wrapped about her shoulders. Levitt was bent at her ear and seemed to be whispering encouragement. Anyone else might see a gentle, elderly man comforting a distraught woman, might be heartened by the thought of loving kindness. What Deal saw incited a sickening mixture of rage and despair. When he turned back to Driscoll, he felt so weary, and even guilty himself.

  “I gotta warn you, it isn’t very pretty up here,” Driscoll was saying. The two of them had to step aside as a uniformed cop came down the staircase, a clear plastic bag full of loose book pages in his hands. Deal thought he saw a smear of blood across one page, then realized it was a plate, some lush illustration—red drapes fluttering behind intrepid swordsmen—torn from one of the old volumes Arch and Els housed in the upstairs annex.

  The cop nodded at Driscoll, let his gaze linger on Deal a moment. “He’s with me,” Driscoll said, and the cop went on by without a word.

  “Come on,” Driscoll said, leading the way up the narrow staircase.

  What had been up there were two pleasant rooms, the first a kind of library where a dignified reading area had been set up—a pair of burgundy leather chairs, each with its own tasseled lamp, a coffee table atop a faded oriental rug in between. Deal remembered it as the kind of place you’d sit in for five minutes, find yourself sliding right out of the world into whatever you happened to be reading.

  He still had the picture of it in his mind when he made the landing. But now the chairs were upended, the lamps tumbled over, brass standards twisted, shades flattened, the rug kicked into a wad in a corner. The old coffe
e table was on its back nearby, its four curved legs thrust up like a wooden animal begging for mercy. The ceiling fans were unmoving, the air thick with a smell he didn’t want to identify.

  Driscoll pointed through an open doorway into the adjoining room, where a couple of technicians busied themselves. The imposing glass-fronted bookcase that had held the rarest of the rare had toppled to the floor and shattered. Pieces of the case’s wooden shelving were stacked like kindling beside a shoal of glass fragments. Here and there a shred of paper or binding poked from the wreckage like scraps of clothing. There was a taped outline of a body on the floor nearby, a grotesque yellow cartoon surrounded by massive dark stains.

  That’s the smell, Deal thought, his stomach churning. Butcher, baker, candlestick maker. That’s what dying smells like.

  Driscoll gave him a closer glance. “You okay?”

  Deal managed a nod. “Did anyone call his parents?”

  Driscoll shook his head, his eyes helpless. “They’re someplace in Asia, chasing the butterfly migrations. One of those kind of trips where you follow your nose. No itinerary, no reservations. The housekeeper says they call in every week or so.”

  Deal nodded. Arch’s father had been a neurosurgeon. One day he’d been scratching the back of his neck, found a lump there. A week later he was under the knife himself. The tumor on his spinal column had been benign, but that’s all it had taken to readjust his priorities. A week in intensive care, six months of physical therapy until he could walk again, the man had retired.

  “He’s got a couple of sisters,” Deal said. “Sara lives in the Midwest somewhere. Arch was just telling me. And there’s a younger one in New York. Deidre.”

  Driscoll nodded. “The one in Omaha wasn’t there when they called. The one in New York is seven months pregnant, already on bed rest because she went into false labor last week. They’re trying to figure out how to tell her.”